STORIES UNTOLD
Untold Games’ CEO, Elisa Di Lorenzo, talks to Matt Broughton about the subtle art of balancing external and internal projects at the same time
E
lisa, tell us a bit about your industry background, and how you came to found Untold Games?
I studied computer science with a focus on computer graphics, and in 2008 I co-founded Untold Games with four university classmates. We started as a Flash game studio, which tells you something about how long we’ve been at this, and grew organically from there, moving through mobile, PC, VR and console over the years. It wasn’t a grand plan so much as a series of honest responses to where the industry was going and what we were capable of building. Sixteen years later, the core team is still together, which I think says something about how we work.
Tell us what Untold Games does. We’re an Italian studio with deep expertise in co-dev and console porting, with a particular specialisation in Unreal Engine. We’re an Unreal Engine Authorised Partner, and we also have experience bringing proprietary technologies into UE for clients who need that. Alongside our client work, we develop our own IP, where we gravitate toward systemic games and emergent gameplay. Both sides of the studio feed each other more than people might expect.
38 | MCV/DEVELOP May/June 2026
Can you take us through a couple of key games of late and explain what Untold Games have done within the project? The most visible thing we can talk about right now is City 20, our own game. It’s a post- apocalyptic survival sandbox set in a sealed nuclear city, in Steam Early Access since September 2024. It’s a deeply systemic game: 80 fully simulated NPCs with individual routines, memories and relationships, interlocking ecological and social systems, where the story emerges from the simulation. City 20 was consciously designed around
our actual strengths as a team. With few 3D modellers but a large number of assets to produce, we built a system to work within that constraint: a custom Blender tool that lets artists apply colours and materials to objects without manually unwrapping UVs, paired with a dedicated engine material that reads the data stored on the meshes to define the final look. Everything draws from just two palette textures (the only textures used for over 90% of the in- game assets). That constraint pushed us toward creative
solutions that actually made the game more visually coherent. On the client side, our work tends to focus on
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